To make this question and the various examples a more useful source there is a designated answer to point out connections between the various examples we collected.

In order to make it a more useful source, I list all the answers in categories, and added (for most) a date and (for 2/5) a link to the answer which often offers more details. (~year means approximate year, *year means a year when an older example becomes central in view of some discovery, year? means that I am not sure if this is the correct year and ? means that I do not know the date. Please edit and correct.) Of course, if you see some important example missing, add it!

I think that this should be community wiki.
–
Loop SpaceNov 11 '09 at 7:55

13

@Jose: Hard to say exactly. My instinct is that the kind of answers that this question will garner are those that didn't involve much actual thought, and the votes up or down will be more an assessment of whether the voter liked the example rather than whether the voter liked the answer (which, ideally, should contain an explanation of why that example shaped the discipline); both of these indicate that the answerers should not gain reputation for their answers, hence community wiki.
–
Loop SpaceNov 11 '09 at 9:50

I can't imagine a counterexample to the following rule: Any question whose purpose is to produce a sorted list of resources (i.e. the question includes, or should include, "one per post please") should be community wiki.
–
Anton GeraschenkoNov 12 '09 at 8:03

8

Why does this question have a bounty anyway?
–
Kevin H. LinNov 21 '09 at 17:33

132 Answers
132

Although this may fall foul of the criticism that it perhaps it has not shaped a subject yet, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that it may still shape a future subject. In a way the answer touches two answers already given: the Platonic solids and also the quaternions.

I am talking about the ADE classification, which appears in the theory of Lie algebras, finite subgroups of $SU(2)$ (McKay correspondence), representation theory of quivers (Gabriel's theorem), singularity theory (Du Val), classification of conformal field theories,...

The arithmetics of conics with pythagorean triples is since long been used as toy model for the beautifull combination of arithmetics, analysis and geometry in the study of algebraic curves, but Lemmermeyer's "Conics - a Poor Man's Elliptic Curves"
and his subsequent arxiv articles pushes the "toy" into the direction of a "fundamental example" for some fascinating issues.

Spheres (of various dimensions) are the fundamental examples of (compact) Riemannian manifolds (or even Alexandrov spaces) of curvature > 0. Several major theorems of Riemannian geometry were motivated by the question of how to recognize a sphere. Most recently this culminated in Brendle and Schoen's proof of the differentiable sphere theorem.

Three related fundamental examples in random matrix theory (in mathematical physics and probability) are the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble, and the Gaussian Symplectic Ensemble. Much of random matrix theory has been devoted to determining the properties of these families of random matrices and proving that other families exhibit the same behaviors.

The discovery of Transcendental numbers, or numbers that are not the root of any finite polynomial with rational coefficients.
Also, the proof that e and π were transcendental, the latter via the proof that ea is only algebraic for transcendental values of a (and e*i*π = -1 is algebraic, as is i, so therefore π must be transcendental). Their discovery, as well as the first explicitly created example, the Liouville number, sparked what's called "Transcendence theory".
And as it turns out, any randomly chosen real number is "almost surely" transcendental. In other words, the density of transcendental numbers among the real numbers is 1!!

$\mathbb{Q}_{p}$. The field of p-adic numbers brings the study of local methods. Hensel's lemma is a great example. It is also interesting that p-adic integers is the projective limit of the rings $\mathbb{Z}/p^{n}\mathbb{Z}$.

Joe Malkevich proposed several basic examples of games in addition to the prisoner dilemma (chicken, chain store game, and centipede) and the Gale-Shapley model of two-sided market model (the model in the famous Gale-Shapley stable marriage theorem). I thought that we should probably add a basic economic model of exchange markets (like the Arrow-Debreu model).

There was also some critique on the classification of examples, and an interesting suggestion By Michael Nielsen that "Distilled and expanded, it could form the basis for an excellent book. Perhaps: 'Examples from the book'." (This refers to Aigner and Ziegler's book "Proofs from the book". (In fact, a similar idea by Ziegler and me have motivated the question itsef.)

The cyclotomic field $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_p)/\mathbb{Q}$ is the most basic example of a field extension in which splitting of primes depends on an obvious congruence condition. Specifically, if $\ell$ is another prime, then the Frobenius of $\ell$ is $\ell \mod p \in (\mathbb{Z}/p)^\times = \mathrm{Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_p)/\mathbb{Q})$. In particular, $\ell$ splits in the field iff its Frobenius is trivial, and this is true iff $\ell \equiv 1 \mod p$. We can then relate other congruences to splitting in subfields of $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_p)$, etc. The theorems of global class field theory show that this basic concept holds in a very general case, although the general case is much harder to prove. This basic example, does, however, motivate the ideas in class field theory, which have greatly influenced modern number theory and related areas. (As an added note, the fact that the Artin reciprocity law is true for cyclotomic fields is actually a key ingredient in the proof for general abelian extensions!)

The free group factors $L(\mathbb{F}_{n})$, which are the closer in the weak operator topology of the left regular representation of the free group $\mathbb{F}_n$, are fundamental examples in von Neumann algebras. The isomorphism question is the root of the so important Free Probability theory of Voiculescu.

Schwarzschild metric as a prototype of black hole was a fundamental example in the development of General Relativity (for instance, it is often referred to when "defending" the ADM mass as a natural concept of mass in General Relativity).

The Lorenz system of ordinary differential equations:
$$\dot x=\sigma(y-x)$$ $$\dot y = rx-y-xz$$ $$\dot z = xy-bz$$
($\sigma$, $r$, $b$ are parameters) is a good example in dynamical system. It is an example of a deterministic system displaying chaotic behaviour. Also the Lorenz attractor. Date: 1963.

The example that launched category theory: (co)homology, for example simplicial homology and Čech cohomology. The various maps linking (co)homology groups for different 'resolutions' of a topological space (by triangulation or open sets resp.) were I think the first examples of natural transformations. This necessitated defining functors, and hence defining categories.

Dirichlet Function is a fundamental example in Calculus where Riemann integral does not work. It is also a function which is discontinuous everywhere. The function D(x) is defined as D(x) = 1, if x is a rational number; otherwise D(x) = 0.

Margulis's expanders: This class of 8 regular graphs is the first explicit example for a family of expanders. The vertices are pairs of integer modulo m, the neighbors of (x,y) are (x+y,y), (x-y,y), (x,y+x), (x,y-x), (x+y+1,y), (x-y+1,y), (x, y+x+1), (x,y-x+1). All operations are modulo m.

Expanders were first discovered and constucted probabilistically by Pinsker. The Ramanujan graphs of Lubotzky, Philips and Sarnak are expanders with extremely good properties. This paper by Hoory, Linial and Wigderson contains much more information.

The Delaunay triangulation is fundamental in computational (Euclidean) geometry. For a finite point set S in general position, it can be defined in several ways: (1) as the unique triangulation in which every simplicial cell is Delaunay (i. e., its circumsphere does not contain any points of S in its interior), (2) as the uniqe triangulation in which every facet (of any dimension) of every simplicial cell is Delaunay (meaning it has some empty circumsphere), or (3) as the dual of the Voronoi diagram (which is also fundamental). In the plane, the Delaunay triangulation has the additional property of maximizing the smallest angle of all its triangles, among all triangulations.

The Delaunay triangulation is usually the most obvious candidate for "the right" triangulation of a given point set, and most simplicial mesh-generating methods seem to be based on it. It doesn't hurt that there are reasonably fast and elegant algorithms for constructing it (very fast in the plane, but unfortunately (and necessarily) exponential in the dimension in the worst case).

I suppose the discrete metric space is a crucial example in the metric spaces theory and in the introductory mathematical analysis.
It shows many aspects and pathological behavior of metric spaces in general.

Taking introductory topology, I got the impression that the real line is the fundamental example of a topological space. I wouldn't be surprised if the open and closed intervals of $\mathbb{R}$ were the prototypical examples of open and closed sets, and I think many important topological properties---including compactness, connectedness, and Hausdorffness---first arose because you need them to prove obvious facts about $\mathbb{R}$ and its subsets.

There are several examples that I would regard as "too fundamental" for the list like: 0, 1,2, $\sqrt 2$, the real numbers, the natural numbers, the prime numbers, the triangle. I also consider Alef_0 and Alef as "too fundamental" and chose Alef_\omega to start the set theory examples.
–
Gil KalaiFeb 20 '10 at 7:33

To make this question and the various examples a more useful source this is a designated answer to point out connections between the various examples we collected. please indicate only strong, definite, nontrivial, and clear connections.

1) The Petersen graph is obtained by identifying antipodal vertices and edges in the graph of the dodecahedron - one of the five platonic solids. Such an identification gives a polyhedral complex realizing the real projective plane. Applying this operation to the icosahedron leads to a 6-vertex triangulation of the real projective plane.

I suppose that $\aleph_0$ and $2^{\aleph_0}$ are, like the natural numbers and the unit ball, "too fundamental" as they are fundamental for mathematics as a whole. But the $\omega^{\mathrm{th}}$ cardinal, $\aleph_{\omega}$ already suits us as a fundamental object in set theory and infinite combinatorics.